Abstract
As a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary enquiry, linguistic landscape (LL) research can shed light on the sociopolitical, cultural and demographical realities of a particular locale. However, LL research has seldom explored major international cities from a translation and contrastive perspective. Drawing on a corpus containing 450 photographs (e.g. shop fronts and public signs), this study investigates the multilingual landscape involving the Arabic-English pair in Dubai, an international hub representing a vivid case of micro-cosmopolitanism and superdiversity in the 21st century. An examination of the bilingual and translation practices enacted on Dubai’s LL points to a ubiquitous phenomenon that the Arabic information is often not authentic Arabic but transliterations from English (pseudo Arabic in disguise). Such use of transliteration privileges the phonetic transference of sounds, at the expense of meaning and function. The prevalent use of transliteration as a ‘go-to’ strategy is interesting, considering the obvious existence of pure Arabic equivalents. To provide some ethnographic context for the analysis, 10 people in Dubai were interviewed (Arabic speakers from different Arab countries) to establish whether the transliterated Arabic can be understood and the possible rationale behind this interesting linguistic decision. Such symbolic and decorative use of Arabic reflects Dubai’s global city status with immigrants significantly outnumbering the indigenous Arabic-speaking natives. The widespread aesthetic use of ‘Arabised English’ points to the influence of English in a globalised world. Some tentative reasons are provided to explain the phenomenon.
Funding source: Partially supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Start-up Fund and partially by the University of Liverpool
About the authors
Chonglong Gu (PhD Manchester; MA Leeds; BA; FHEA; PgCAP Liverpool) is currently an assistant professor in translation and interpreting at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, after serving as lecturer and founding programme director of MA Chinese-English Translation and Interpreting at the University of Liverpool, Merseyside, UK. As an interdisciplinary and socially engaged researcher, his scholarly interests chiefly reside in CDA/PDA, corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, English language teaching, sociolinguistics, linguistic landscape, world Englishes, multilingual crisis and disaster communication, translation and interpreting studies, media and communication, and Chinese studies. His recent academic writings since 2018/2019 have appeared in major international peer-reviewed SSCI-indexed journals such as Critical Discourse Studies, Discourse, Context, and Media, Language and Intercultural Communication, Discourse Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, Perspectives, International Journal of Multilingualism, Target, Linguistica Antverpiensia, Frontiers in Psychology, The Translator, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Translation and Interpreting Studies, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and various book chapters.
Ali Almanna obtained his PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Durham in the UK and is currently Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar, where he teaches and supervises MA and PhD students. In addition to numerous articles published in peer reviewed journals, he is the author, (co-)editor and translator of several publications, including The Routledge Course in Translation Annotation (2016), Semantics for Translation Students (2016), The Nuts and Bolts of Arabic-English Translation (2018), The Arabic-English Translator as Photographer (2019), Reframing Realities through Translation (2020), and Translation as a Set of Frames (2021). He is also the series editor of Routledge Studies in Arabic Translation.
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Funding: This study has been funded partially by the University of Liverpool and partially by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Start-up fund).
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